Author: Veronica Foale

The house is held together with baling twine and hope. We bought it with our fingers crossed, just looking for somewhere that we could call home.

It was a mess then.

**

When we moved in, it took 6 of us to remove the filth left behind.

I took on the bathroom with bleach and elbow length rubber gloves and I scraped and scrubbed until I could see the floor under the dirt. I wished for a hazmat suit the whole time.

Eventually it was liveable.

Eventually.

**

Nathan moves an old tank filled with bits of concrete to weigh it down.

Underneath he finds a stash, wrapped in decaying garbage bags, a hollow underneath the tank containing syringes and water. No drugs – although we’ve got no doubt they were here before.

We clean it up.

Like every other mess we’ve found, we don protective gear and get it over and done with.

You don’t want to know what we found in the old stables.

**

Nathan starts pulling out an old broken window.

I bounce next to him and make him pull out the frame as well.

It’s not enough; it’s never enough and I make him pull out the wall as well, talking grand ideas of laserlight and indoor greenhouses. Before he knows it I’ve convinced him to tear down the slats that enclose the BBQ area and we’re letting in the light, brushing away dirt and cobwebs and wondering why we didn’t do this sooner.

**

Later we sit, admiring our handiwork, looking up at the stars. Watching the night sky in front of us, the moonlight on the garden. The cool breeze floats through to the kitchen, a welcome addition on a summer night.

There is an awful lot of work left to do, but things cost money, something we are frequently short on. We tell ourselves that it won’t be forever and we plan our escape, how we’ll put this house on the market and buy something else.

But not yet.

For now, this place is home.

I  lay flat on my stomach, a weed mat protecting me from the muddy earth. In front of me a snail makes it’s way back towards my greenery; a terrible model, it won’t stay still.

Carefully I snap photos, even as I wish that we had chickens that I could feed them to. They’re decimating my cabbages, tens of them slithering over the purple heads together, a tiny snail army. Their task – to eat and procreate, an eternal circle of life. Unfortunate that my garden is at the centre of it.

It’s a war I’m not winning, as slowly the holes in the cabbage leaves get bigger and the capsicums and cauliflowers are more hole than leaf.

***

My tomatoes are growing. Faster and faster, like a snowball picking up speed down a great hill. I can’t keep up and instead I’m left, trying to contain the chaos and prevent immediate injury.

Carefully I tie branches higher and support the green fruit with more baling twine. I hammer stakes into the ground and twirl the stems around them. I kneel in the middle of the tomato jungle, getting wet and muddy as I baby the plants along, preventing catastrophe.

I emerge from the plants, hair tousled and smelling like tomatoes. I look like I’ve been in a fight, with leaves in my hair and dirt on my face.

But the tomatoes are up off the ground, away from the pillaging slugs and I can breathe easy about the safety of my plants.

At least until tomorrow when the my daughter and the puppy go crashing through the garden.

Again.

Twelve months ago, we were glued to our television screens. Breathing shallowly we watched the flames race across Victoria, swallowing everything in their grasp.

The firestorm raged on

and on

and on.

We sat here, hundreds of kilometres away and cried as we listened to the body count rise; as they found more people dead. Dead in the streets, in their cars, in their houses. People who never had a chance, even as they ran from the flames.

The devastation unfolded before us and I’m not sure we comprehended it. Not entirely.

173 people dead. The worst bushfires ever.

Black Saturday they christened it, in the aftermath.

And I sit here and type while I listen to people on TV cry, twelve months later, and I remember. The faces of the broken and the grieving. The people at the community centres, waiting for word from family members who stayed behind.

I held my newborn son, and I stood in front of the TV, rocking backwards and forwards with his head tucked under my chin and I cried.

Twelve months on and we remember.

Oh how we remember.

We will never forget.